Women, if they wanted once again to become the heroines of national recovery, needed only to make their education bear fruit at home, Zanta urged. ‘We are not telling you to give it up, but to give it to your husband for whom you can be the intelligent co-worker, and to your children. Have the courage to endure and be patient. Our leader also advises you to do this and, before criticizing it, act; action will show your true worth more than all your diplomas.’
Zanta’s counsel, however extreme it may appear today, was woven into the Vichy fabric of belief that moral collapse was at the heart of the French defeat. The republican slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité was now replaced by Travail, famille, patrie. Vichy passed unenforceable laws, clearly flouting the belief in égalité, such as that forbidding the employment of married women in the public sector (overturned in 1942 through necessity) and those insisting on a different curriculum for schoolgirls to cover cookery, laundry and domestic hygiene. Vichy’s socially conservative policy, reinforced constantly in speeches, placed ‘the family’ at the heart of policy and elevated the idea of women as mothers and homemakers, making babies and cooking, as the only acceptable version of femininity. For Vichy policy makers, women’s primary role was to uphold the family and look pretty to welcome home (an often absent) father. Anything which detracted from that ideal, such as smoking, wearing masculine clothes including trousers or having short hair, was discouraged in both propaganda and laws.*
Corinne Luchaire, no longer able to make films because she was suffering from tuberculosis, now gave similar advice to women from a less academic viewpoint. She now went regularly to a sanatorium in Haute-Savoie where she played bridge and poker, drank champagne, wrote newspaper columns – and still smoked. She was coughing blood, while getting thinner and weaker.
Even in her autobiography she barely spoke of these years in the mountains. She was so truly isolated from the world that it felt like a dream time. For her, the reality was her life back in Paris when she spent her days patronizing couturiers and accompanying her father to official functions. She recalled in her father’s weekly journal:
My first reaction was one of revolt against any idea of elegance or novelty. Yet one evening, while I was crossing from one bank to another and observing the Seine, I understood that it was normal to speak once again of elegance. It was impossible that life would not resume, that Paris would not continue with its tradition of elegance, the seduction of the arts and beauty. And for us Parisiennes, after completing our duty, as mothers or in our profession, our role was to put on the costume, the adorable and ridiculous hat covered with flowers, birds, ribbons and feathers whose panache was indispensable to us.